Universal and binary builds (was: Re: Is isysroot useful for non-universal?)

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Mar 23, 2009, at 15:12, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
> I would want (at least) one build server for each OS and processor  
> combination, but if we began with just a single Intel Leopard  
> machine, that would cover the majority of users. If we add a  
> corresponding PowerPC Leopard machine, then we could do something  
> interesting: Once the Intel and PowerPC builds are sent to the  
> download server, the download server could combine both builds into  
> a single universal binary package.

Why put it on the back of the download server?  Let the user handle  
this.  That way if we support n differnet architectures, we just need  
to host n files (one tarball for each arch) instead of n! files (one  
tarball for each combination).  With ppc, ppc64, i386, x86_64 that's 4  
versus 24 files which would probably be about 10x storage space  
required (just a rough estimate considering that the combined packages  
will be larger than the individual ones)

> It would use lipo, probably assisted by the code we have in the  
> MacPorts merge procedure or the muniversal portgroup. It would avoid  
> the above problems with our existing universal variants because the  
> configure phase would run once for each processor, on that  
> processor. We wouldn't need to deal with SDKs anymore. (I've never  
> been comfortable with the idea of allowing the user to specify an  
> SDK in macports.conf, so I don't see it as a problem that that would  
> not be accommodated by our binary builds.)
>
> Using the above, we would have stable 32-bit universal binaries. We  
> would also want each build server to separately build 64-bit  
> versions. Obviously the build servers would be 64-bit machines.

This just needs 2 build servers per OS version.  Setup a ppc chroot on  
the ppc64 box and an i386 chroot on the x86_64 box.  Since rosetta  
doesn't handle ppc64, we can't narrow this down to a single x86_64 box.